Chapter 1 Overview of Community Features

This chapter contains the following:

• Overview of Communities

• Community URLs

• Overview of Community Portlets

Overview of Communities

The portal collaboration feature allows end users to create and join communities, and interact with other community members through a set of collaborative portlet applications (community services). Communities are, therefore, an association of members and services. These services are: file share, shared tasks & events, polls & surveys, wiki, discussions, and blog. For more information on these services, see Part II, Community Services.

Communities are created and managed by end-users. The user can be in one or more roles (visitor, owner, member, invited, pending, rejected). The community owner can set the access control on the community content, membership, and visibility of the community. The owner of the community can also remove the community or transfer ownership of the community. For more information, see Chapter 3, Managing a Community.

The portal administrator can define community templates that defines the layout mechanism and the available services, and end-users can create communities within categories using the available templates. See Chapter 4, Understanding Community Templates for more information. Users must join to take part in community collaboration.

Each portal will have its own set of communities. Communities within a portal will only be visible to users in that portal. The community users are stored in a relational database, one database instance per portal (see Chapter 2, Configuring the Database for more information).

This release includes community management functionality through the Portal Server management console and through the command line. See Technical Note on Technical Note: Managing Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 Update 1 Communities for more information on managing the communities from the command line.

Community URLs

Community URL refers to the URL of a community page. Typically, the community URL is http://server/portal/dt?dt.community=CommunityName. The community home URL http://server/portal/dt?dt.community will take the user to the community system home page (if visible to the user).

Community URLs can be:

• Bookmarked in a browser.

• Emailed to another user who can click on the link from their mail reader to access the community.

• Entered directly into a browser, by hand.

Community URLs are cross-organization. The same URL will work in any community enabled organization. This allows a user in one organization to send a community URL to a user in another organization. If a community URL is accessed by an unauthenticated user, the user is redirected to a login page and then taken to the community after successfully logging in. The community system home page does not require login. If a user is a member of a community, the community URL will take the user to the community member page. Otherwise, the user will be taken to the community visitor page.

Overview of Community Portlets

The community portlets bundled with the Portal Server implement the community infrastructure.

Community Info Portlet

This application lists all registered members of the community and allows the community owner to add and delete users from the community. As an owner of a community, this application allows the user to manage community membership, change access settings, and delete the community. Community owners can also transfer ownership of the community to a registered member through this portlet.

Registered users can join any community and leave a community at any time. This application allows users to join or leave a community, accept or decline an invitation to join a community, and request for membership to a community.

To allow visitors to search and join communities, the Community Info portlet must be in the visitor's display profile.

Community Portlet

This application allows users to create communities, browse community taxonomy, and perform searches on existing communities and the content posted on the communities.

Community Membership Portlet

This application allows a user to see a list of communities that the user is a member of, communities that the user has been invited to, communities to which the user has a pending membership.

Role Management Portlet

This portlet is deprecated and the equivalent functionality is available through the Community Info Portlet.